


When Did You Know?

by vials



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, original filming era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28803402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: when did you know it was not safe to speak, when was the first time you knew you were not safe? whose words scratched out of which documents, what words becoming double-barrelled? whose sweet song is safety, whose sugar? what is the cost of safety, what is its colour, tone, and tax bracket, what language does it speak?and if safety’s price is your silence, are you good with this?are you good?Or, the first time Alex Kralie realises it's hopeless.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	When Did You Know?

It was unusual for Alex to be late for a shoot, and by _unusual_ it could be understood to mean _it had never happened before_.

Even Alex wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened. He hadn’t been caught up in any traffic, he had left on time, he hadn’t taken any extra time doing anything that morning. Usually he arrived on set far before everyone else, and usually he left long after everyone, too. Yet somehow, despite the morning appearing to operate completely normally, Alex pulled up to find that everyone’s cars were already present.

He didn’t even notice it at first. He felt tired, so tired – the kind of tired that seeped right down into his bones and made it nearly impossible to do anything at all. Even the act of undoing his seatbelt and climbing out of the car seemed to take a monumental effort, and as he straightened up the world spun around him with such intensity that he fell against the car, a shock of alarm passing through him. That was about the time he noticed that there were other cars in the lot, which would be unusual for the time of day; vaguely he recognised that the cars were familiar, but it wouldn’t be until he was walking across the field towards the set that he realised who the cars belonged to.

By that point the others had been there for almost forty minutes. They watched Alex approach from some distance, and ordinarily it would have agitated Alex, all of them staring like that, but this morning he couldn’t find the energy to be annoyed. He barely even noticed that they were looking; he was too busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. The grass was damp with dew and it sparkled wildly as he moved, hurting his eyes. He could feel the beginnings of a headache, and he realised that it had been there for some time – perhaps even since the night before. Alex stifled a yawn and tried to remember when he had gone to bed. He remembered sitting at his computer, going over a few things for class, and he remembered thinking that he should probably start heading to bed… he was sure he had set the camera up on the nightstand, ensured that it had a fresh tape in it, but after that he couldn’t remember. He supposed he had gone to brush his teeth, but he didn’t recall heading to the bathroom, and he didn’t recall actually getting into bed.

Come to think of it, he didn’t actually recall much of the morning, either. He _assumed_ it had all gone as normal, but as he dragged his aching body across the grass and towards the narrow line of trees, he couldn’t actually remember any details at all. He was sure he hadn’t bothered to eat breakfast, which in hindsight had been a stupid decision – the dizziness as he had straightened up suddenly made a relieving kind of sense – but he didn’t remember actually packing up his things, or getting into his car. It occurred to him that he was still wearing the exact same clothing as he had been wearing the previous evening, just an old pair of cargo shorts and a T-shirt that was slightly too thin for this time of the morning. Had he slept in them? He hadn’t had time to review the tape when he got up; in fact it hadn’t even occurred to him.

Alex was beginning to grow increasingly uneasy. By now it was evident that the timing was off; everyone was watching him, and as he got closer he could detect various things on their faces that told him something was unusual. Tim was glowering at him, though that in itself wasn’t uncommon; he stood slightly apart from Brian and Sarah, smoking steadily. Sarah looked mostly confused, perhaps a little curious underneath it all; Brian looked worried, and that was what finally made Alex admit that something was very off about the timing. For a start, why was everyone else already here?

“You showed up, then,” Tim said, as Alex drew level with them.

The thin line of trees cut them off from the steadily rising sun, and Alex became aware of the fact that he was uncomfortably cold. There was no reason for him to be so cold – it was the height of summer, and already he could feel the threat of humidity gathering in the air, but none of it seemed to sink beneath his skin. He wished he had thought to bring a hoodie, but that just reminded him of the fact that he apparently hadn’t bothered to get changed into something new that morning, and that in turn reminded him of the fact that far more was wrong than he could articulate. He didn’t want to dwell on it; didn’t want to think about any of it at all, but even Alex wasn’t stubborn enough to believe he could make this situation seem normal.

“I’m not ridiculously late,” Alex replied, in a weak imitation of his usual annoyance. “Unless you’re counting from the time I actually get here before any of you, in which case that’s _extra_ time I spend here and has nothing to do with you.”

“Shocker, that the director has to spend more time on the set,” Tim muttered, dropping his cigarette to the ground and stepping on it.

“Tim,” Brian said quietly. “It’s only forty minutes after the usual time, and we’ve only been here half an hour anyway.”

“Forty minutes?” Alex asked sharply. “What do you mean it’s been _forty minutes_?”

Everyone exchanged a look. After a moment of silence Sarah held up her phone, the screen lit and turned to Alex so he could see the time.

“We were going to meet at eight,” she said. “But, as you can see…”

It was nearing a quarter to nine. Alex stared at the phone in utter disbelief. He always left early; always made sure he was the first person on set, so he could clear anything up he didn’t want in shot, work out what he would be doing with the angles and the lighting, make sure nothing major would interrupt them. He liked to scout out the area, ensure that nothing strange was happening, nothing like what he had been seeing increasingly often on those tapes – he didn’t know what he planned to do if he did come across something, but he liked to make sure nevertheless. He would never be any later than an hour before everyone else, and usually it was closer to two. That meant he would get up at around half five, six in the morning, and be in the car by half six at the latest. He was absolutely sure he must have stuck to that routine today – why else would he not remember it? – and it was only a half-hour’s drive from his house to this set. The traffic would have been good, and it had never taken him any longer before. So how had he somehow managed to take nearly three hours to get here?

“Is everything… alright?” Brian asked. “You look kind of confused.”

“I thought I was on time,” Alex muttered, before he could stop himself. He heard the words leave his mouth and immediately kicked himself, but there didn’t seem to be any way he could backtrack. “I mean, I thought I’d still manage to get here on time.”

“We tried calling you,” Sarah said. “All of us called you a couple of times, actually. And we texted. Did you not get any of them?”

Alex leaned over to the side and set the camera bag down, before reaching into his pocket and pulling out his phone. His fingers seemed numb and clumsy; it took him several tries to type the passcode in and unlock the phone, and then it was only to discover absolutely nothing at all. The phone showed no missed calls, no new text messages. He shook his head.

“I guess it’s broken,” he said.

“You picked up a couple of times,” Brian said. “Or, the phone did, at least. We thought maybe it had hit against something in your pocket. There was just a weird kind of tone, like maybe you were driving and it was muffled.”

“It doesn’t show anything,” Alex said. “Look.”

He held the phone up for the others to see; Tim raised an eyebrow, and Sarah frowned in thought, tapping her own phone. As Alex lowered his phone again the screen lit up, Sarah’s call coming through with no issue at all. He frowned and hit the accept button, hearing that it had connected fine. When he hung up, the call showed up in the call history with no trouble, but the previous call in the log was still from yesterday morning.

“Weird,” he muttered.

“Could you have deleted it?” Sarah asked.

“Why would I have deleted it?” Alex asked. “That makes no sense.”

“I was just _wondering_ ,” Sarah said, putting her phone back in her pocket. “it’s weird that you managed to miss numerous calls and texts from all three of us, that’s all.”

“Maybe you were just in a dead zone,” Brian suggested. “There’s loads of them around here. Sometimes my phone stops working altogether; like the battery gets drained.”

“Maybe,” Alex said, without much conviction. “I should have been here by then, though. But I wasn’t.”

“Where were you?” Brian asked.

Too late, Alex realised he didn’t _know_. He had either still been at home – which was not a place he would have been at that time – or he would have been on set, which he quite clearly hadn’t been. The only other alternative was that he had been driving, but again, how had he managed to make a half-hour drive into one that had lasted almost three hours? It made no sense. He had the sudden urge to jog back to the car and check the mileage, how much gas he had used, but the thought of walking all the way back after having just got here was too exhausting to comprehend. His head was beginning to ache with insistency, and the points of light where the sun filtered down through the leaves were unbearable to look at. He still felt cold, and there was a tickle in his chest that hinted he was developing a nasty cough. Had he somehow managed to catch something? He was never sick at this time of the year, and usually his health was pretty reliable.

“You’re not filming,” Tim said suddenly.

It occurred to Alex that he had left Brian’s question unanswered; that it was not the kind of question that should have had him frowning in such obvious confusion. There was something in Tim’s voice that seemed to imply his comment was related to that silence; something that told Alex he was well aware that something unusual was going on, and Alex wanted to be annoyed at him for it but found himself too horrified over the simple truth of the statement. He wasn’t filming – he didn’t even have his personal camera on him. It hadn’t been in the car, because he would have seen it balanced precariously on the dashboard; he would have brought it out with him. The last time he remembered having the camera was right before he went to bed, and then he didn’t even remember laying down. Was it possible the camera was still on his nightstand? If it was, that would destroy any conviction that Alex was still managing to cling to that the morning had been a regular one.

“No,” he said, his throat suddenly dry. “I’m not.”

“Given it up?” Tim asked.

“No,” Alex said, the word almost a croak.

He was beyond trying to be discreet. The realisation that he hadn’t been filming, that he _still_ wasn’t, was too terrible to leave room to worry about anything else. His hands were shaking badly as he shoved his phone back into his pocket and crouched down by the camera bag, feeling strangely distant from himself as he fought with the zipper. He could feel the others watching him, knew they were doing so with some level of concern, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Only when he had pulled the camera free from its bag and begun recording did he feel like he could breathe again, like that little red REC in the corner of the screen was some kind of protection. Alex wondered why he was still clinging to that idea. He had seen on tape after tape that the camera didn’t provide any protection at all; it could only act as witness to whatever happened to him, but Alex still thought there was a kind of protection in that.

Once the camera was rolling Alex remained kneeling, looking at the small screen like it might be able to answer his questions. Slowly he panned the camera around him, watching the screen for any hints of unusual activity – the short little freezes he would catch there, or the picture slipping briefly out of focus. He found nothing, but it did nothing to loosen the dread in his chest.

_Where was I?_ he asked himself, over and over again. _What happened this morning?_

“Alex?” Sarah asked, and Alex got the impression she had said his name more than once before. He looked at her, eyes focusing slowly, the ache in his head beginning to keep pace with his pulse. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Alex mumbled.

“I mean—your ear,” Sarah said. “It looks like blood.”

Alex reached up, touching a finger against the ear she indicated.

“No,” Sarah said, before exchanging another concerned glance with Brian and Tim. “Inside it. There’s—I really think it’s blood.”

Alex pressed a finger to the inside of his ear, feeling something there. The blood was flaky, dry; slightly deeper he could feel that it was still sticky, and when he looked at his finger he could see the traces of red on it. He frowned, scratching at the dried blood, realising that there was not a small amount of it.

“It’s in—Alex, are you alright?” Sarah asked, alarmed. She had taken a step closer; now she was looking down at him with real concern. “I can see more of it in your hair.”

Alex reached up and ran a hand through his hair, feeling his nails catch on more dried blood. Somewhere distantly he could feel the beginnings of terror, but he was too exhausted and in too much pain to fully comprehend it. Brian had stepped closer now, too; only Tim hung back, lighting another cigarette, glancing at Alex every other second with something that looked sometimes like hostility, other times like fear.

“Alex, did you hit your head?” Brian asked, leaning closer. “Could you have been out here earlier, maybe fallen? If that’s the case you should probably go to a hospital, man.”

“Yeah,” Sarah agreed. “If you’re bleeding from your ear—I mean, that’s pretty bad, I think.”

“I didn’t hit my head,” Alex muttered, though even as he said it he realised he should have probably taken the out. “It’s just—probably a cut or something, I don’t know.”

“Alex, it’s clear you don’t have a clue where you’ve been for the last several hours,” Sarah said firmly. “You’re late and you’re never late; you can’t explain _why_ you’re late. You’re not acting like how you normally act – you’re all distant and spaced out, and you forgot your camera, and you _always_ have that camera. That’s not—I mean, that screams _concussion_ to me.”

“I just have a really bad headache,” Alex said lamely, though he realised the second he had spoken that he had probably just added weight to the concussion story. Why did it frustrate him so much to think they believed that was the case? It seemed insulting, considering the danger he was in – the danger they were all in. “Migraine, maybe.”

“Have you _ever_ had a migraine before?” Brian asked.

“You can just get them sometimes,” Alex said.

“If this is going to just keep going on, I’m going home,” Tim said suddenly. “Alex, I don’t think you’re in any state to do anything. I don’t particularly want to be hanging around here. I’ll catch you later.”

“Tim, come on,” Brian said, turning to him. “I can’t leave him like this.”

“I didn’t say you have to come, too,” Tim said. “I’ll walk.”

“It’s three miles back to town.”

“So? It’s not that long.”

“Do you really have to leave right this very second? We should probably all just go. Alex, can you drive? Are you alright to drive?”

“I’ll walk,” Tim said. “It’s fine.”

“Tim—”

Alex allowed them to continue arguing back and forth, paying little attention to what was being said. His head felt like it was being split in half, and he wondered if perhaps he _had_ managed to hit his head. He straightened up slowly, the ground tilting under him again, keeping his eyes on the camera’s little screen. There were his shoes, damp from the grass; the bare skin of his lower legs was scraped, Alex realised, like he had been walking through brambles. He moved the camera up and panned it quickly around, catching a brief glimpse of the others: Sarah frowning and chewing on her lip, Brian and Tim still talking, Brian looking increasingly concerned and Tim increasingly agitated. Looking at their miniatures from behind the safety of the camera, Alex allowed himself to see something he hadn’t let himself acknowledge before – they all looked tired, they all looked utterly exhausted. Tim was wearing a jacket despite the growing heat, and Brian and Sarah’s eyes were each set deep in shadow, their faces drawn and pale.

Alex moved the camera away from them and pointed it out across the grass, towards the denser trees on the other side. The picture moved with him and then froze quickly, jumping to catch up with the angle of the camera in a blink, but Alex had noticed it. He moved the camera back, seeing it freeze again; when it finally caught up the picture was blurry, the camera refusing to focus. Alex zoomed in, seeing the picture blur until it was nothing more than a smear of colours – shades of green, the deeper shadows between the trees, and—

Something else, something pale and watching, staring right back at Alex through the screen in the briefest moment of focus. Alex turned away, trying to take a steadying breath, but it was too late; the coughing came suddenly and violently, each one feeling like it could easily split his head open. He tasted something metal; wiping his arm over his mouth he saw blood there, and quickly he turned his back on the others, trying to force the coughing down, trying to swallow the blood. It took him several moments to be able to catch a breath, and then he was aware of the fact that Tim was coughing, too; he was crouched low to the ground, his cigarette held out as he turned his head against his arm and coughed those same chest-deep, wet coughs that had overtaken Alex. Alex stared at him, and after a moment Tim seemed to sense it; he looked up, caught Alex’s eye, and something passed between them in the look – a sense of dread, like they had each caught the other doing something they shouldn’t be doing.

It should have been a relief, to see the acknowledgement that something was terribly wrong written plainly on the face of another, but rather than any sense of shared understanding Alex felt a sudden revulsion; a deep urge to get as far away as possible. Tim apparently felt the same way; still coughing, he lurched to his feet and stumbled away from the group, shaking his head as Brian called after him. He didn’t look back once, and Alex was sure he could see him quickening his pace; sure he would be jogging the second he was out of sight.

“What is going _on_?” Sarah asked. Her voice was almost shrill, and Alex at first took her for annoyed. Only when he looked at her did he see the fear on her face, that instinct knowledge that something wasn’t right. “Are both of you sick? Why did you both start coughing like that?”

“I guess it’s going round?” Brian suggested. “I mean, that would explain why Tim and Alex both look so rough.”

Alex wanted to point out that Brian and Sarah didn’t look too great, either, but he held his tongue. He knew how it would go if he didn’t – they would demand to know what he meant, and he would have to tell them that they looked exhausted, that they looked drained, that they looked exactly how he felt. He would have to tell them that he bet they weren’t sleeping well at night, that sometimes they would wake up feeling like they had never slept at all; he might even say that he bet they had woken up at least once and found themselves in a location that they couldn’t recall setting out for. It would all come rushing out of him if he let it, because it was too much now, too undeniable – what he had seen on the tapes, what he had just seen on the camera. He had never seen it live before. He had only ever seen it on the tapes – or at least, he thought that was the case. How would he know, when he could go home and forget all of this? The tapes were his only clue, the camera his only witness, and until now he had thought he was alone but somehow that had been easier to deal with. Only now did he realise why; did he realise that it had allowed him to remain in denial, to pretend that this was something that could be explained away. Tim had destroyed that idea, destroyed it the second he had begun coughing in the exact same moment as Alex had. Now Alex could see everything he felt reflected on Tim – he was always cold, he was always tired, he was frequently distant, zoned out. He had that terrible cough, that irritability. It was after him, too, and if it was after two of them why not all of them?

“Alex?” Brian asked, and again Alex got the impression it was not the first time his name had been spoken. “Look, if—I mean, you’re clearly not feeling alright, so I think we should get out of here. You really don’t look good, dude. What’s going on?”

Alex shook his head, the movement slow and laboured. He wanted to say, he wanted to let it all come out, he wanted to tell them to run and not look back. He wanted to gather every single tape he had shot over the last couple of months and light them up; he wanted to destroy every second of the evidence, to go back to a time before he had had to acknowledge it. The only thing that stopped him was the simple fact that it was impossible. It would still happen even if he wasn’t filming it; there was nothing he could do. Nothing good could come of cutting himself off from the only method of finding answers that he had, and that meant he would have to keep filming. He didn’t want to know, but there was no other choice. He could hardly live with not knowing.

“Alex,” Brian said, a note of pleading in his voice. “What’s _wrong_? You look—you look scared out of your mind.”

It would be a wonderful thing, Alex thought, to be able to share this; to tell someone and have them admit perhaps they had noticed something odd too, or even that they hadn’t but they still believed him. It would be nice to know he wasn’t losing his mind, but he had seen it plain as day on the tapes. He didn’t need to tell Brian, he didn’t need to tell Sarah, he didn’t need to tell any of them. It would be better, he thought, if they didn’t know. It would be safer. He didn’t know what that creature wanted; he didn’t know what speaking about it might do. Was it possible it could somehow invoke it even more? Could it be that catching it on camera had agitated it somehow; that his only method of ensuring his safety was also putting him in danger? If that was the case he supposed it was all the more reason to keep filming. Better its attention remain on him than start spreading to the others. Where would it stop?

Alex looked at Brian’s worried expression and wanted to tell him, but he forced the words back down. He had no idea where this was going to go. He had no idea what was going to happen. It was best, then, to keep it to himself – to get his bearings first, to work out what needed to be done.

_There’ll be something_ , he told himself, trying desperately to believe the words. _There’ll be something. You just have to be patient – you just have to give it time._

“I just don’t feel too great,” Alex finally said, forcing the words to remain calm, even. “I think that much is obvious. I guess I caught whatever it is from Tim.”

“You look—”

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” Alex said. “Truth be told I don’t really know if I’m actually here. I think I should just go home and sleep it off. I’ll call you when I need you next.”

“You won’t need us tomorrow?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t think I should bet on being well enough to be here,” Alex said. He didn’t want to be anywhere near this place ever again, if he were honest, but while that was impossible he could at least try and put some distance between himself and this place. “Maybe leave it a couple of days. Tim looks pretty sick, too. I think we should all just get out of here.”

_Tell them_ , he thought suddenly. _What if this is what it wants? What if this is how it separates you; isolates you?_

_And what if telling is how it spreads?_

There didn’t seem to be any answer that sat right, though Alex at least felt some relief as Brian and Sarah looked at one another and Brian gave a resigned shrug, indicating they should probably just leave. It at least felt right, to gather their things and head back towards the parking lot, though Alex couldn’t relax completely. His head was still pounding, and the camera screen was still showing glitches, places where the picture was nothing but a blur. He was leaving this place behind for now, but he couldn’t help but realise that it didn’t make much of a difference at all; it didn’t make him feel any safer. What did safety look like, in the face of this? Alex felt as though he were dragging something after him, bringing it with him even as they stepped off the trail and into the parking lot, even as he slipped into his car and closed his eyes and waited for the world to stop spinning around him.

It had seen him, Alex knew. It had been different today. It had always watched him; now he had watched it back. Some new boundary had been crossed and Alex could feel it. He felt dirty, tainted. There were still eyes on him, eyes that he couldn’t see.

He knew then that he would never be safe again.


End file.
